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Friday 8 September 2017

Mankind's biography now in a bigger mess than ever?

Fossil Footprints from Crete Deepen Controversy on Human Origins
Günter Bechly  


It looks like 2017 could become some kind of genuine annus horribilis for the established scientific consensus on human evolution. It all began with five discoveries that made worldwide headlines earlier this year:

After years of hot debate, a new phylogenetic analysis by Argue et al. (2017) . (2017) finally revealed that the “Hobbit,” Homo floresiensis from Indonesia, is not a dwarfed descendent of Homo erectus, as had become the majority view, but a descendent of an archaic African hominin close to Homo habilis that should neither exist at that remote place outside of Africa nor at that late time more than 1.75 million years after the supposed extinction of such forms (Australian National University 2017).
A new study by Dirks et al. (2017) proved that Homo naledi from a cave in South Africa, which was celebrated as missing link between ape-like australopithecines and our own genus Homo, is really only 250,000 years old and a contemporary of more modern humans. Consequently, it is much too young to be an evolutionary link (Barras 2017a), but on the other hand also much too primitive for its young age.
As reported by Gibbons (2017), Australopithecus sediba, another failed “missing link,” was refuted as an ancestor in the Homo lineage by paleoanthropologist Bill Kimble in a new phylogenetic analysis, and instead attributed to a far removed South African australopithecine clade of more ape-like beasts(Evolution News 2017).
Next, a further story of the standard narrative of human origins fell apart:  Holen et al. (2017) demonstrated in the journal Nature that humans did not first arrive in America only 14,000 years ago, but roamed in southern California some 130,000 years ago. This discovery rewrites the history of mankind and, as we read at the time, “will spark a firestorm of controversy” (Greshko 2017).
Finally, in June the discovery of 315,000-year-old early Homo sapiens skull fragments and stone tools from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco (Hublin et al. 2017Richter et al. 2017) overturned the established wisdom that Homo sapiens originated more than 100,000 years later and 3,000 miles farther east in Ethiopia. This discovery did indeed “shake [the] foundations of the human story”  (Sample 2017) by showing that “our species evolved much earlier than thought”  (Tarlach 2017a) and by “disputing the popular notion that there’s an East African ‘Eden’ or cradle of humanity”  (Newitz 2017).
So five previously “undisputable facts” of human evolution turned out to be nothing but bogus claims this year. But of course evolutionary storytelling is flexible enough to accommodate all these new “facts” in a revised just-so story. Alternatively, it may prefer simply to dismiss the evidence as false, as in the last case of the oldest Americans. But 2017 is not done with human evolution yet.

On August 31, news from Uppsala University in Sweden announced, Fossil footprints challenge established theories of human evolution.”  The discovery indeed is a bombshell that will likely create considerable further controversy. The technical publication by Gierliński et al.  describes fossil footprints from Trachilos in western Crete that are reliably dated to a Late Miocene age of about 5.7 million years. These footprints are indubitably from a large bipedal primate with human-like feet, and it is precisely the shape of our foot “that is one of the defining characteristics of being part of the human clade” (Ahlberg & Bennett 2017). As Discover Magazine reports, “In a year of big shake-ups in the story of human evolution, a study published in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association may be the biggest shock yet” (Tarlach 2017b). That is because of the following enigmas:

The fossil footprints are out of place because they are much too old: even though radiometric datings seem to be lacking, the biostratigraphic dating is very well established by marine microfossils called foraminifera as index fossils in the layers above and below the horizon with the footprints, as well as a typical signature for the climax of the Messinian Salinity Crisis (5.6 ma) in the sediments directly above them  (Ahlberg & Bennett 2017). With an age of 5.7 million years, these footprints are 2.5 million years older than the iconic Lucy fossil and even 1.3 million years older than Ardi. Among the alleged hominin ancestors only the two dubious taxa Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad (about 7 million years old) and Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya (about 6 million years old) as well as the imprecisely dated Ardipithecus kadabba from Ethiopia (5.8-5.2 million years old) may be older. However, none of them has the feet preserved, so that we do not know whether they were ape-like or human-like.
The fossil footprints are out of place because they occur in the wrong geographical region: all of the early hominins that are older than 1.8 million years have only been found in Africa, which led to the well-known standard textbook knowledge that humans originated in Africa and only after the advent of our own genus Homo migrated to other continents in several “Out of Africa” events. A European hominin at such an early age simply does not fit the common narrative and refutes the beautiful “Out of Africa” story.
The fossil footprints are far too modern in their appearance: with their long sole with characteristic ball and big toe in line with the other toes (all lacking claws), these footprints differ from those of all other land animals, including the more ape-like feet (without ball and with the big toe sticking out sideways) of the much younger Ardipithecus ramidus, which is the earliest hominin with well-preserved feet, discovered in 4.4-million-years-old layers from Ethiopia. The Crete footprints rather resemble the famous Laetoli footprints from Tanzania that have been dated to an age of 3.66 million years and attributed to Australopithecus afarensis as the oldest known human footprints until now, but look rather similar to modern human footprints.
This implies that the well-established scenarios of human evolution must be false, not only concerning their geographical location and timing, but also concerning the pattern of character origins and the alleged lineage leading from Ardipithecus via australopithecines to humans. When the oldest known evidence for hominin feet predates the alleged African ancestors such as Ardi and Lucy but already shows relatively modern human footprints, what is more congruent with this new evidence when looked at without bias: a gradual Darwinian evolution, or rather a saltational origin that requires intelligent design?

Another obvious and apparently difficult question is how such bipedal animals, whether hominin or ape, could reach the island of Crete at all. However, in this case there could be an elegant solution indeed: right at the geological time when the footprints originated, Crete was connected to mainland Greece because the Mediterranean Sea had largely evaporated during an event, already noted, that is called the  Messinian Salinity Crisis (5.96-5.33 million years ago), caused by a closure of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Interestingly, earlier this year  Fuss et al. (2017) published an article in PLOS ONE that proposed hominin affinities of Graecopithecus (also called “El Graeco”) from the Late Miocene (c. 7.2 million years old) of Greece and Bulgaria. There are only a few jaw fragments, but they are claimed to allow an attribution of El Graeco to the human lineage. This is based on the small roots of the canine teeth, suggesting their reduced size as in hominins, as well as a fusion of the roots of the premolar teeth that is typical for hominins, but very rare in recent chimps. If this attribution is correct, it would make Graecopithecus the oldest known hominin, and the possible ancestor of the hominin that produced the Trachilos footprints in Crete  (Ahlberg & Bennett 2017Gierliński et al. 2017) Fuss et al. suggested that the chimp-human split may have occurred about 8 million years ago in Southeast Europe rather than in Africa. Yet even though this hypothesis did not in any way contradict the idea of a Darwinian evolution of humans, it still attacked the cherished scientific consensus of the “Out of Africa” hypothesis, which of course invited strong criticism of these “heretical” ideas (Barras 2017bCurnoe 2017).

Unsurprisingly, such criticism was not restricted to the technical arguments but extended to ad hominem attacks on the character of the researchers. For example, David Alba from the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona said that the study’s co-author David Begun has been arguing for twenty years that the great apes first appeared in Europe, so that “It is not surprising at all that Begun is now arguing that hominins as well originated in Europe” (Barras 2017b) “Sergio Almécija, … at George Washington University, says it is important to bear in mind that primates seem particularly prone to evolving similar features independently. ‘Single characters are not reliable to make big evolutionary [claims]’”  (Barras 2017b).It is interesting that the latter argument is very rarely used by paleoanthropologists to question the attribution of the African alleged hominins like Lucy to the human lineage. Apparently, questionable evidence is acceptable as long as it agrees with the preferred evolutionary narrative.

It is revealing that the title of the new article is followed by a question mark, since the authors have no other reason to be skeptical about their discovery than the inconvenient age and geographical location of the fossil footprints. This is actually admitted by the last author of the study, distinguished paleontologist Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, who says “What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints, … This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate”(Uppsala Universitet 2017) 

It is already becoming evident that many evolutionists will try to get rid of this cumbersome conflicting evidence by considering these footprints as having been made by an European Miocene ape, which convergently evolved a bipedal locomotion. This is even though the fossil footprints themselves do not suggest any difference from human tracks that could support such an ad hoc assumption (Ahlberg & Bennett 2017). In any event, independent (convergent) origin of similar structures is a very common phenomenon in the history of life, which is quite unexpected if Darwinian evolution would be true. Therefore, such an assumption of convergence would create another problem in this particular case: there are only a few characters that allow an attribution of the earliest hominin fossils to the human lineage, such as small canine teeth and adaptations for bipedal locomotion. However, if bipedal locomotion evolved several times among unrelated apes, as may also be suggested by Oreopithecus bambolii from the Late Miocene of Italy  (Rook et al. 1999; but see Russo & Shapiro 2013),then one of the strongest character complexes looses much of its force.

Given the fact that the evolutionary trees are built on only a few characters, which have weak support because of incongruent (homoplastic) distribution, these trees do not justify the often bold claims about the allegedly well-established lineage of intermediate hominin fossils bridging the gap between chimps and modern humans. At the very least, after the dramatic experiences of the 2017 discoveries, paleoanthropologists should be more humble and admit that we know far less than we thought and what we know is much less certain than what is still taught to pupils and students as well as presented to the general public by science popularizers in the media. Human evolution is still a highly controversial field, and given the large number of data studied with the most modern methods, this might give some reason for pause.

Tarlach (2017b) comments that “In a year when we’ve learned our species is at least twice as old as we thought, and some researchers have claimed that hominins were in the Americas more than 100,000 years before the conventional arrival date, hey, anything goes.” Well, “anything” surely only refers to anything that does not question the Darwinian paradigm of human origins as such, even when more and more evidence accumulates against it.

But 2017 is still not over. Maybe further surprises are ahead.

Literature:

Ahlberg P, Bennett MR 2017. Our controversial footprint discovery suggests human-like creatures may have roamed Crete nearly 6m years ago. The The Conversation August 31, 2017.
Argue D, Groves CP, Lee MSY, Jungers WL 2017. The affinities of Homo floresiensisbased on phylogenetic analyses of cranial, dental, and postcranial characters.  Journal of Human Evolution 107: 107-33.
Australian National University 2017. Origins of Indonesian Hobbits finally revealed. Science Daily April 21, 2017.
Barras C 2017a. Homo naledi is only 250,000 years old — here’s why that matters. New Scientist 25 April 2017.
Barras C 2017b. Our common ancestor with chimps may be from Europe, not Africa.  New Scientist 22 May 2017.
Curnoe D 2017. Did humans evolve in Europe rather than Africa? We don’t have the answer just yet. The Conversation May 23, 2017.
Dirks PHGM et al. 2017. The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa. eLife 2017;6:e24231.
Evolution News 2017. Science Magazine: Australopithecus sediba “Ousted from the Human Family.” Evolution News April 25, 2017.
Fuss J, Spassov N, Begun DR, Böhme M 2017. Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the Late Miocene of Europe. PLOS ONE.
Gibbons A 2017. A famous “ancestor” may be ousted from the human family.  Science April 23, 2017.
Gierliński GD et al. 2017. Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete?Proceedings of the Geologist’s Association.
Greshko M 2017. Humans in California 130,000 Years Ago? Get the Facts.  National Geographic April 26, 2017.
Holen SR et al. 2017. A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California,  Nature 544: 479-83.
Hublin J-J et al. 2017. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 546: 289-92.
Newitz A 2017. 300,000 year-old “early Homo sapiens” sparks debate over evolution.  Ars TechnicaJune 11, 2017.
Richter D et al. 2017. The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age.  Nature 546: 293-96.
Rook L, Bondioli L, Köhler M, Moyà-Solà S, Macchiarelli R 1999. Oreopithecus was a bipedal ape after all: evidence from the iliac cancellous architecture.  PNAS 96(15): 8795-9.
Russo GA, Shapiro LJ 2013. Reevaluation of the lumbosacral region of Oreopithecus bambolii.  Journal of Human Evolution 65(3): 253-65.
Sample I 2017. Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story.Guardian June 7, 2017.
Tarlach G 2017a. Meet The New Oldest Homo Sapiens — Our Species Evolved Much Earlier Than Thought.  Discover Magazine June 7, 2017.
Tarlach G 2017b. What Made These Footprints 5.7 Million Years Ago?  Discover Magazine September 1, 2017.

Uppsala Universitet 2017. Fossil footprints challenge established theories of human evolution.  Press release 2017-08-31.

Tuesday 5 September 2017

On convergent evolution or how Darwinism labels its ignorance.

“Convergent Evolution Is Even More Improbable than Evolution Itself”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer  

From Jerusalem, Ira Berkowitz for ID the Future continues a fascinating conversation with Lee Spetner, author of  Not by Chance and The Evolution Revolution Discussions of what ails evolutionary theory hardly come more lucid or crisp than this.

Download the episode here, or listen to it here

What’s even more implausible than evolution? That would have to be convergent evolution, as Dr. Spetner, an MIT-trained physicist, points out. Darwinists pulled the concept out of thin air to describe how widely separated creatures on the phylogenetic tree independently “converge” on wondrous biological innovations, such as echolocation (in dolphins and bats, for example). That remarkable coincidence extends down to fine chemical details not found in other animals.

How did such things get there? If explaining the unguided evolution of echolocation in whales is tough enough, explaining how it popped up in bats, too, naturally multiplies the difficulty. In fact, Spetner says of convergent evolution that it explains nothing but is simply a case of “giving a name to our ignorance.”


As an alternative to Darwinian theory, Spetner proposes his Non-Random Evolutionary Hypothesis, evidently purposeful evolution as a response to environmental and other stresses.  He characterizes the idea neatly to Ira Berkowitz.

Sunday 3 September 2017

More on Darwinism's Zombies

On Darwinism's Zombies

Hear us in our own words







AUGUST 1, 2014 | GLOBAL NEWS








Witnesses Campaign to Advertise World’s Most Translated Website, JW.ORG

NEW YORK—On August 1, 2014, Jehovah’s Witnesses will begin a month-long global distribution of a new tract entitled Where Can We Find Answers to Life’s Big Questions? to raise awareness of their official website, jw.org. Accessible in about 500 languages, with publications available for download in almost 700 languages, jw.org is the world’s most translated website.
Over one million unique visitors go to jw.org each dayThe site features articles and videos offering practical advice to people of all ages, backgrounds, and circumstances. One of these videos, entitledWhy Study the Bible?, will be linked to a QR code found on the new tract. This video merges live-action elements and animation to illustrate the practical benefits of studying the Bible. It is currently available in over 450 languages and has been downloaded nearly 4 million times since it was released on November 18, 2013.








J. R. Brown, a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses at their world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, explains: “We are excited about this campaign. There are some eight million of Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world, and all of us will be speaking to our neighbors about this website. This may be the most extensive campaign that we have ever organized.”








Geoffrey Jackson, a member of the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses, states: “Since its launch two years ago, people all over the world have found jw.org to be an invaluable resource. On this site, you can watch videos that can help your children, consult articles that can help your family, and even read the Bible online. We want as many as possible to benefit from jw.org, and that’s why we initiated this special campaign.”
Media Contact(s):
International: J. R. Brown, Office of Public Information, tel. +1 718 560 5000

Saturday 2 September 2017

It's O.K to not be rowdie?

Titans of the kitchen.

On the limits of natural selection.

Listen: Lee Spetner on What Natural Selection Can Do — And What It Can’t
Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

On a new episode of ID the Future, Ira Berkowitz interviews Lee Spetner in Jerusalem. Together they explore key arguments from Dr. Spetner’s books  Not by Chance  and The Evolution Revolution .

Spetner, a PhD from MIT, takes on natural selection, discussing what it can and cannot do. He also explores aspects of population genetics and the constraints the Earth’s history imposes on evolving new species.


Download the podcast here, or listen to it here.

The skilled trades:Still the smart choice.

The Skilled trades:Still the smart choice.II

The watchtower Society's commentary on John 1:1

Is Jesus God?

MANY people view the Trinity as “the central doctrine of the Christian religion.” According to this teaching, the Father, Son, and holy spirit are three persons in one God. Cardinal John O’Connor stated about the Trinity: “We know that it is a very profound mystery, which we don’t begin to understand.” Why is the Trinity so difficult to understand?


The Illustrated Bible Dictionary gives one reason. Speaking of the Trinity, this publication admits: “It is not a biblical doctrine in the sense that any formulation of it can be found in the Bible.” Because the Trinity is “not a biblical doctrine,” Trinitarians have been desperately looking for Bible texts​—even twisting them—​to find support for their teaching.

A Text That Teaches the Trinity?

One example of a Bible verse that is often misused is John 1:1. In the King James Version, that verse reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God [Greek, ton the·onʹ], and the Word was God [the·osʹ].” This verse contains two forms of the Greek noun the·osʹ (god). The first is preceded by ton (the), a form of the Greek definite article, and in this case the word the·onʹ refers to Almighty God. In the second instance, however, the·osʹ has no definite article. Was the article mistakenly left out?

The Gospel of John was written in Koine, or common Greek, which has specific rules regarding the use of the definite article. Bible scholar A. T. Robertson recognizes that  if both subject and predicate have articles, “both are definite, treated as identical, one and the same, and interchangeable.” Robertson considers as an example Matthew 13:38, which reads: “The field [Greek, ho a·grosʹ] is the world [Greek, ho koʹsmos].” The grammar enables us to understand that the world is also the field.

What, though, if the subject has a definite article but the predicate does not, as in John 1:1? Citing that verse as an example, scholar James Allen Hewett emphasizes: “In such a construction the subject and predicate are not the same, equal, identical, or anything of the sort.”

To illustrate, Hewett uses 1 John 1:5, which says: “God is light.” In Greek, “God” is ho the·osʹ and therefore has a definite article. But phos for “light” is not preceded by any article. Hewett points out: “One can always . . . say of God He is characterized by light; one cannot always say of light that it is God.” Similar examples are found at John 4:24, “God is a Spirit,” and at 1 John 4:16, “God is love.” In both of these verses, the subjects have definite articles but the predicates, “Spirit” and “love,” do not. So the subjects and predicates are not interchangeable. These verses cannot mean that “Spirit is God” or “love is God.”

Identity of “the Word”?

Many Greek scholars and Bible translators acknowledge that John 1:1 highlights, not the identity, but a quality of “the Word.” Says Bible translator William Barclay: “Because [the apostle John] has no definite article in front of theos it becomes a description . . . John is not here identifying the Word with God. To put it very simply, he does not say that Jesus was God.” Scholar Jason David BeDuhn likewise says: “In Greek, if you leave off the article from theos in a sentence like the one in John 1:1c, then your readers will assume you mean ‘a god.’ . . . Its absence makes theos quite different than the definite ho theos, as different as ‘a god’ is from ‘God’ in English.” BeDuhn adds: “In John 1:1, the Word is not the one-and-only God, but is a god, or divine being.” Or to put it in the words of Joseph Henry Thayer, a scholar who worked on the American Standard Version: “The Logos [or, Word] was divine, not the divine Being himself.”

Does the identity of God have to be “a very profound mystery”? It did not seem so to Jesus. In his prayer to his Father, Jesus made a clear distinction between him and his Father when he said: “This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ.” (John 17:3) If we believe Jesus and understand the plain teaching of the Bible, we will respect him as the divine Son of God that he is. We will also worship Jehovah as “the only true God.”

What you think you know may not be so?

Out of Africa IV

Friday 1 September 2017

And still yet more iconoclasm.

A.N. Wilson in The Times – Against Darwinist Absolutism
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer   

Tearing down historical statues, all the rage at the moment, is egregious vandalism and, I think, will be regretted down the road when it’s too late to restore irreplaceable monuments. But if you insist on knocking over tributes to figures of the past with painful legacies, why not Darwin?

The great man’s latest biographer, A.N. Wilson, wants to seriously upset how we think of his subject, and he demonstrates it again in an essay published by The Times of London, Darwin’s greatness is founded on a myth.” Wilson’s book,  Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, of which the article looks to be a précis, will be out in Britain next week. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for it here until December. Other than commending him for his liberal politics and for being a “supremely observant and talented naturalist and collector of specimens,” Wilson finds little to praise in Darwin.

The article, presumably like the book, is not anti-evolution per se, and certainly not an expression of creationism (“indeed at variance with scientific truth”). Instead he castigates Darwin as ambitious, cagey if not dishonest in refusing to acknowledge the sources of his idea, unscientific, lending support to the racial and other prejudices of his time, and encouraging of much darker and more dangerous ideas. This is familiar material, but extremely well said.

He begins by observing of On the Origin of Species, “It is often spoken of as a work of science.” “Often spoken of,” but not really that?

Whatever you make of it, it is a strange book. Most of its central contentions, such as the idea that everything in nature always evolves gradually, are now disbelieved by scientists, and the science of genetics has made much of it seem merely quaint.

Of Darwin’s other famous book:

In his Descent of Man, he finally admitted how he thought humanity had evolved. It is an absurd, indeed embarrassing, book. I wonder sometimes how many Darwinians have actually read it to the end. It tells us that savages such as he met in Tierra del Fuego spoke largely in grunts and had almost no vocabulary. Yet missionaries visited the place not long after Darwin and compiled a dictionary of their language, finding they possessed a vocabulary of over 30,000 words.

On Darwin as a scientist, and the precious Galápagos finches:

A generation later, and the Darwinian faith had evolved the story of the master’s Damascene conversion to the theory of natural selection while he was a young man on HMS Beagle, sailing to the Galapagos Islands. We all know the story. Darwin noticed the different finches, from island to island, and how they had different-shaped beaks. It was here that he saw the phenomenon of descent by gradual modification happening before his very eyes.

What actually happened was this. Darwin sent back a vast number of specimens collected during the voyage of the Beagle. The notion is propounded that a revolution was taking place in his views on the immutability of species. As a matter of fact, Darwin failed to identify most of the finch specimens that he collected on the Galapagos as finches at all. Some he labelled blackbirds, others “gross beaks” and one a wren. He gave them to the Ornithological Society of London, who gave them to John Gould, an ornithological illustrator, to be identified. It was Gould, not Darwin, who recognised that they were all distinct species of finch.

It was Captain FitzRoy, not Darwin, who made collections of finches and labelled them correctly, and, as Harvard University’s Frank Sulloway demonstrated in 1982, it was FitzRoy’s identification of the differences between the finches which enabled Gould to make his remarkable observations.

Darwin never mentioned the differences between the finches in the Origin of Species, even though, during the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of publication, Gould’s drawings of the Galapagos finches were reproduced again and again as if they were Darwin’s “discovery”. Moreover, Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionary biologists from Princeton University, spent over 25 summers studying these birds, mainly on the island of Daphne Major. They revealed that the beak changes were reversible. This is hardly “evolution”.

On Darwin’s eugenic legacy and the problem, as he saw it, of brutes racing past civilized men like himself in populating the world:

Darwin made it clear that he thought something would have to be done to correct this troubling state of affairs. His cousin Francis Galton took up the suggestion and pioneered the “science” of eugenics, in which he openly advocated making it illegal for savages and the working classes to breed. We all know where that led in the time of the national socialists, but we sometimes blind ourselves to the source of Hitler’s ideas.

Historians may object that Wilson’s critiques are not original to him, but seem to be assembled from other sources. However, Wilson isn’t an academic historian or a specialized scholar and doesn’t claim to be. The subjects of his past historical books have ranged across centuries and continents, from ancient Palestine to Victorian and 20th-century England. He is a literary critic, novelist, and popular biographer. Assuming that he acknowledges his sources in the book, and that his facts are otherwise correct, I don’t see this as a devastating criticism at all.

Instead, this biography appears to be part of a larger rethink of evolution that is bubbling away in a variety of areas. The Royal Society meeting last November is part of it. (See our post from earlier this week, Evolutionary Theorist Concedes: Evolution ‘Largely Avoids’ Biggest Questions of Biological Origins.”) Stephen Meyer in his books has documented the scientific problems with unguided evolution that, until recently, have been kept hidden in the professional literature. Jonathan Wells, Douglas Axe, David Berlinski, Tom Bethell, and others have contributed to unmasking the failure of Darwinian theory to account for biological novelties – what we think of as “evolution.”

A prominent atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, coming out as a Darwin skeptic is part of this phenomenon. Tom Wolfe’s Darwin-doubting book on the evolution of human communication, The Kingdom of Speech, is part of it. Yes, the steadily accumulating case for intelligent design, and demands for academic freedom in teaching about evolution in localities across the United States, are relevant too.


Whether Wilson, a master storyteller with a keen wit, is the man to finally topple Darwin’s idol is not really the point. I can’t say more without getting a chance to read the book, but the fact of its being written and published at all, and by Darwin’s own publisher (!), gives further evidence of a growing trend in the culture, both scientific and literary, against Darwinist absolutism. And that’s good news.